Recently, GamingBolt had a chance to interview Sean Tracy, US Engine Business Development Manager at Crytek. They asked him about the 8 GB of RAM in both current generation consoles and whether it will be sufficient for future needs. Sean Tracy’s comment on this subject were rather surprising as he said that this 8 GB can be filled up easily.

This sparked a rather interesting discussion on gaming forum NeoGAF. CRYENGINE Online Marketing Manager, who goes by the nick of Com_Raven on NeoGAF, decided to clarify the statement made by Sean Tracy.

I know that some people (some of which I think might have never played any of our games^^) love to go “lol Crytek, they can only do graphics demos”- but the person quoted here is Sean Tracy, whose title is – as indicated in the interview – “US Engine Business Development Manager”. So he actually works far more with our licensees like Turtle Rock or Cloud Imperium than on our own internal games : )

Also, as a tech company for whom the engine is an important part of the business, we are obviously also always looking at the future, and not just the here and now- remember that we are just coming off of an 8 year console cycle. I think it would be fair to say that in the next 8 years, you will see games that would benefit from having more than 8GB of RAM (and as many pointed out already, not all of that is accessible to game devs either way).

I understand that console wars are important business ; ) , but rather than just see it as “Crytek criticises my console, their games suck”- take a moment to consider it from the view of a company that has to constantly ask itself “what might engine technology look like in 5 years”. Not jsut for our games, but also for the games that the people we want to license our engine to might want to develop (see Star Citizen as a good example).

Crytek wanted a minimum of 8 GB for next generation consoles so it was rather surprising to see them calling it not enough for current generation. Com_Raven explains that while the current generation console do have 8 GB of RAM, not all of them is accessible to developer.

3 Years ago, one of our Core R&D people said “I would really like to see next-gen console platforms with a minimum of 8GB”. This is now kind of the case- there are 8GB in the consoles, but not all of it is accessible to devs.

Now another website asks another Crytek employee if he agress with another developer saying that devs will find ways to fill up 8GB of RAM, and he says yeah, they can be filled up in the future.

This clarification pretty much sums it up for what Crytek meant with their statement. Even though 8 GB might seem sufficient now, we can’t really predict how requirements will increase in the future. The RAM requirements are only going to go up for sure. Developers will have to find new way to best utilize the limited RAM and optimize the game to their needs, once they start to easily fill it up.

What do you think about this statement made by Crytek? Let us know in the comments below.

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Crytek…give it up…Ryse didn’t put you in any headlines and this won’t either. Your telling everyone what we know. We know 2-3gb is set aside for the OS. We aren’t as stupid as you think. Learn how to compress a texture. You didn’t impress me when I had dual nvidia’s and 16gb of ram in my pc.